Blossom Time Read Online Free

Rosalind’s direction.
    Lord Sylvester was silent a moment as his dreams crashed and shattered around him. A lady! He had been conned by a provincial miss! He’d be the laughingstock of London. His nose pinched. “I see,” he said, then added with a cool smile to Rosalind, “How delightful.”
    “A misunderstanding,” Rosalind said. She decided it was time to unwrap herself from her shawl and let it fall around her waist. “My name is Frances, with an e. It must have been my handwriting— perhaps I inadvertently spotted the page above the e. I was thrilled when you accepted my poetry, Lord Sylvester.” Her eyelashes fluttered in double time. “Only a gentleman of your scholarly reputation would dare to praise a lady’s work, to place it on a par with gentlemen’s writing. But that is the sort of bold initiative we have come to expect from Camena.”
    This line of talk went down very well with Lord Sylvester, who had a taste for the butter boat. He began to think that he might make something of Miss Lovelace after all. She was rather pretty—that couldn’t hurt. He liked the notion that only he would be so daring as to puff up a lady. When the truth was revealed, he must let it be known that he had realized she was a lady from the beginning.
    “Camena. What does the word mean?” she asked. “I could not find it in any of my reference works.”
    “You are not the first to inquire, Miss Lovelace,” he said, in quite a civil way. “It is the Latin equivalent of Muse. Muse, of course, is Greek. The word is done to death. I had thought of using the word Erato, the Muse of poetry, but then it tends to be confused with errata and, of course, Eros, laying the name open to coarse jests. I would not want my magazine to be mistaken for some bawdy thing. In the end, I went with Camena.”
    “Roz is greatly interested in such things,” Dick said. “A regular bluestocking.”
    “Oh, hardly that!” she objected. “But I do feel I have learned a great deal from your critiques in Camena, milord. I was thrilled that a gentleman of your preeminence found my poems worth looking into.”
    The more she talked, the better he liked her. The tea tray arrived and she poured, making a great show of asking how he took his tea, and would he care to try Cook’s pastries.
    “Roz is up on all the latest writing,” Dick threw in, thinking to puff her off. “She’s not content with simple country pleasures. Quite the dasher is Roz.”
    Lord Sylvester listened with rising hopes. He saw that Miss Lovelace was no deb. She had been out and about for a few years. The word “dasher” raised his hopes for some serious flirtation, preferably away from her home parish. London, for choice. He was soon “confessing” that he had suspected a lady was behind the poems from the beginning.
    “Truth to tell,” he lied, “it is half the reason I came down to see you. I was hoping that you would have something we might put out in our autumn issue. After its publication in early September would be a good time to introduce you to the literati in London, when interest is at its peak.”
    “Oh, I should like it of all things, milord!” she cried. Her cheeks were flushed with pleasure and her green eyes glowed.
    Lord Sylvester drew out a cloisonné snuffbox, lifted a pinch between his thumb and forefinger, and applied it to his nose. He flickered his handkerchief over his nostrils to dispel any lingering residue but did not sneeze.
    “And London will adore you, Miss Lovelace,” he said, gazing flirtatiously into her eyes. “One item is not yet clear to me, however. With such a charming and redolent name as Rosalind, why did you sign your letter Frances? I notice Mr. Lovelace calls you Roz.”
    “Frances is my second name,” she said, racking her brain for a better excuse. “I thought it sounded more . . . er, serious than Rosalind.”
    Lord Sylvester studied her a moment, then his thin lips opened in a conspiratorial smile. “You